Heretofore, a great variety of roofing shingles have been developed for residential and commercial buildings. There are roofing shingles made from asphaltic laminations, asphaltic impregnated fiber glass or organic felt plastic materials, metal and wood composite material covered by a thin shell of hard plastic material backed by foam plastic. All of these various roofing shingles applied to roofs of slopes exceeding a 3 foot rise in 12 feet require considerable overlap of adjacent shingles to insure a water tight seal and, therefore, require the use of a relatively great number of shingles for a given surface of roof. Also the presently known roofing shingles have limited weatherability or operative life. In addition, some roofs requiring reshingling must first have the existing shingling removed to avoid the irregularities of the old shingling from being discernable in the newly shingled roof. These and other disadvantages of presently known roof shingles are eliminated by the improved roof shingle of this invention.
The method of producing the improved roof shingle according to this invention is of the continuous type, as distinguished from the conventional batch processes and labor intensiveness of presently known fabrication techniques.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide an improved roofing shingle having a high degree of weatherability and yet relatively inexpensive to produce.
Another object of the present invention is to provide an improved roofing shingle in which overlapping of the vertical edges of the shingles is greatly reduced, while at the same time the need for flashing under the area of vertical abutment of next adjacent roof shingles is eliminated.
A further object of this invention is to provide an improved roofing shingle capable of being provided with a surface contour such as striations or corrugations to give it the appearance of hand-split shake or slate.
Yet another object of the invention is to provide a method of fabrication of an improved roofing shingle and the roofing shingle attained thereby which results in little or no emissions and uses no solvents as compared to asphaltic methods.